Should one support one’s own country at international sporting fixtures? If so, why? Take the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Bosnian Muslims (Bosniacs) and Bosnian Croats have been busy rioting again following the defeat of Croatia by Turkey in the Euro 2008 football match. The Bosniacs supported Turkey, the […]
Were/are all the horrors across former Yugoslavia driven by ‘age-old ethnic hatreds’? Or was/is it all more about gangs of criminals wanting to steal TV sets? Misha Glenny, brilliant Balkan analyst, has the answer. Buy the analysis here.
Battle is being joined on what happens next with the Lisbon Treaty following the irish No. The Irish are saying that there can be no quick solutions. The French and Germans are calling for everyone other than the Irish to ratify. The Czechs are saying that the Treaty is dead. […]
Is Kosovo moving towards ‘functional partition’ (or more likely dysfunctional partition)? The nub of the international problem in Kosovo is that on the one hand the EU/US claim to rule out on principle partition on ‘ethnic’ lines, while on the other they claim that the independence of Kosovo is not in […]
The Belmont Club look at Michael Totten’s impressions from Sarajevo. This captures my attention: Sarajevo has largely recovered from the physical scars of the 1990s battles. The one thing that has changed — ripped apart by ethnic powerplays — is the easy sort of intercommunal tolerance of 30 years ago. […]
Imagine you are the Foreign Office in London. A bit of a wildcat in your youth. Yet still squeaky keen to show Relevance and Cleverness. Egad! An idea dawns. Let London lead the praise for the sybaritic delights of latter-day Western personal freedom! British Embassies should all fly the LGBT […]
The BBC last night led its top news programme with warnings of a new famine in Ethiopia, "caused by two factors – drought, and rising food prices". The main ‘deeper’ cause is in fact the long the reign of Marxist terror by dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, which killed a million […]
Zimbabwe as expected falls ever more steeply to total disaster. The gang of military/security leaders previously dependent on Mugabe now look to be running the shop, desperate as they are to cling on to power and privileges at the cost of ruining their own country. A text-book case. Yet the UN still […]
You may well be wondering how many countries have formally recognised the independence of Kosova (or Kosovo as HMG call it). Here is what looks like a pretty comprehensive list. Thus as of the end of May 2008 Kosovo’s independence has been recognised by (only?) 42 out of 192 UN member […]
Read this remarkable piece by Ben Macintyre about the huge collection of papers and other material deliberately buried by heroic Polish Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto disaster of WW2. They knew what they were doing: The compilers of this archive knew they were doomed, and framed their project as an […]
